Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Octopi Wall Street!

That was one i09 reader's comment on this astonishing piece of video:



Yes, that's right: a walking octopus. An octopus that hauls its gelatinous body out of the water, crawls across the land, drops a crab off with some onlookers (at 2:08), and then flops back into the drink.

We knew they were clever creatures, easily the smartest of the invertebrates -- apart from an occasional bishop -- but we had no idea they could walk. Frankly, we find the idea disturbing.

A couple of other i09 readers made Cthulhu jokes, which were inevitable, but another told an absolutely freaky story about a science teacher who thought kids were stealing fish from his tanks. So he set up a camera, which filmed the nocturnal shenanigans of an octopus. This monster of the deep was able to squeeze itself through a quarter-sized hole, crawl along a counter, climb into another tank, eat a resident, and then escape back the way it had come -- covering its tracks.

We at the Egg, for one, welcome our cephalopod overlords.

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